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Tuesday, August 23, 2016

What Doesn't Kill You ... Still Hurts

by Carole Towriss

The week before last my daughter made the varsity volleyball
team. She’s the only sophomore on the team. The same week, two of her best friends
didn’t make the cut for their JV soccer and dive teams. They had worked just as
hard as she had, all summer long.

Like almost everyone else, we’ve been watching the Olympics
the last couple weeks. I would venture to say that every Olympic athlete has
put their life on hold for the last four (or eight or twelve) years, sacrificing
more than I could possibly imagine. They strained relationships as well as muscles, gave up movies and ice cream, and sometimes put years of education on hold.
Every one of them. And yet in each duel, race, match, or game, only one individual
or team took home that elusive gold medal.

Disappointment. It hurts, especially when we don’t deserve
it. Some of those athletes were injured out of the block, their only chance
vanished like smoke into before they even began. Others lost a medal when
someone else won it in a way some would consider cheap. Still others fought valiantly, only to lose at the last second after hours of competition.

But it always hurts, whether in sports or life. It’s how we
handle that frustration that defines our character. One of my daughter’s friends decided to
be the team manager when she didn’t make the team. The coaches so admired her
attitude and tenacity they still wanted her around, even if she wasn’t going to
be a player on the team.

We’ve heard about Abbey D’Agostino, the American runner who
collided with a New Zealander and tore her ACL. She ended up with a chance
to put her faith into practice in front of millions. “In theory I’ve known that trusting God
and giving my whole self to him is the only way in which you can feel that
peace and joy and satisfaction that he offers. But it’s another thing to
experience that and to be caught up in a situation where what you believe is
exposed.”

Her last-place finish allowed her to tell the world about
Jesus, literally.

Other times we may never find a reason for our disappointments.
I’ve written often about the loss of our first baby, and the birth of our daughter Emma exactly one year later on Christmas Eve. While it makes a nice
story, it still doesn’t give me a reason for that heart-breaking loss.

Sometimes we are just ... disappointed.

And that is when we have
to believe, as hard as it may be at that moment, that joy will come again.